A human visual system has the characteristic of color constancy and may acquire a constant feature of a surface color of an object under a variable lighting environment and imaging condition. For example, no matter whether a white object is observed under an indoor tungsten lamp or the white object is observed under dark light, a human can perceive that the object is white. This is because that human brains have been adapted to colors of objects under different light in continuous growth processes of humans.
However, an imaging equipment has no such a regulation function and is required to select an algorithm for proper color balance to eliminate influence of a lighting environment on color presentation. In a related art, there are multiple white balance algorithms for calculating a gain and performing white balance processing on the basis of the gain. However, the specific algorithm to be adopted for calculation of the gain is usually selected by a user in a user setting manner in the related art.